The average price of homes in Canada is rocketing up but it is really a story of two cities and the foreign money they attract, say analysts. The January value of a re-sale home increased by 17 per cent to $470,297 over a year ago. But this is deceiving because outside of Ontario and B.C. (Toronto and Vancouver) the gains in price are much  lower, says the Canadian Real Estate Association. Strip the two cities out of the numbers and the average Canadian home was worth $338,392 last month while the year-over-year gain drops to eight per cent.

Planner Jennifer Keesmaat to reveal more about Toronto’s transit “motherlode.” Rich.  Metro

Republished from February 6, 2016: Josh Matlow (Ward 22) will join local parents on Tuesday, February 16, 2016 between 7 and 9 p.m. to keep alive the dream of a Midtown Community Hub at the site of a new Davisville Public School near Yonge St. and Millwood Rd. Several community uses will be discussed that would benefit the wider community at such a recreation and community hub. The meeting will take place at Greenwood College School, Room 103, 443 Mt Pleasant Rd. Who will give Davisville Village a Hub — and a heart? 

It’s about five centimetres and it is making a mess of everything. The snow is forecast to end late Tuesday afternoon and it will be mainly cloudy tonight with flurries beginning again before tomorrow morning. The city says it will continue to salt the roads during rush hour this morning.

https://twitter.com/TO_WinterOps/status/699544274069798913

The Emergency Department at St. Michael’s Hospital has been closed until further notice as the hospital deals with a flood caused by a broken pipe. It sounds as if the damage is considerable.  Patients are being cared for in other parts of the hospital and no new emergency cases are being accepted.

Drake spent Valentine’s Day and the NBA scene with a woman he calls his “favourite person in the world” — a Toronto teacher who helped the rapper graduate high school. He and teacher Kim Janzen took in the East versus West matchup and other festivities. “My date for tonight’s game. Who else but my favourite high school teacher who helped me graduate,” Drake wrote on Instagram. “Happy Valentine’s. Hope everybody is getting love from somewhere,” he said. Drake graduated high school in 2012, just before his 26th birthday.

The Toronto Zoo panda cubs which were born on October 13, 2015, continue to grow. Now just over 4 months old, they have started taking solid steps and are becoming extremely mobile.

A project in Okotoks in southern Alberta captures heat from the sun in summer and uses it to heat homes during winter. It appears to follow the geothermal heating concept employed at a home at 43 Bessborough Drive in Leaside. This project was profiled in 2011 and is re-published just below. Advocates of this method, like the man interviewed in this CBC report, speak of the practical to climate change. But it is also a concept to achieve uninterrupted power supply (UPS), or at least more consistent power when a home or neighborhood goes off grid. Home storage batteries fed by solar is another.